Kid_Kyoto wrote:WarOne wrote:
The sad part is is that these women also mutilate themselves when they are denied the opportunity to have any freedom.
There are instances in which women scald themselves in cook oil or light themselves on fire because their only escape is through acts of violence against themselves as all their other freedoms have been taken.
I'd not heard that about Afghanistan, but I'd heard in India the perfered way for women to commit suicide is self-immolation.
WTF?
And the ones who fail come out with burns over their entire body. I thought the whole point was to get AWAY from pain...
Even the Japanese never latched on to that one.
Anyway... so who votes for the ED209 plan?
Here is the body of my work for a Women's Study class that focused on the international women's movement. Enjoy.
Women in Afghanistan are so repressed, that some have taken to dousing themselves in gasoline and setting themselves ablaze reports Patience (2009) in a BBC news article recently. The report continues by citing that “a combination of poverty, illiteracy, domestic violence and lack of freedoms continue to drive this decades-old trend” within the Afghan providence of Herat. A rise in rape cases has been reported by the United Nations within Afghanistan due to a lack of control by NATO forces and the Afghan government. These levels of abuse are at levels little better than before the Taliban’s rule prior to 2002. This can be seen in a news piece written back in November of 2008 when 15 girls were splashed with acid by men on motorcycles. The attack was most likely from conservative or reactionary members of society that either adhere very strictly to traditional ways of life or feel threatened by the growing freedom of women. As of yet however, this freedom is hard to see. Merinews journalist Shah Shamin states that the trend of repression is so great that Afghanistan had the highest rate of violence against women in the first half of 2008 comparative to any other country in the world (and again the violence is attributed to the Taliban or society as a whole). It concluded by saying the Ministry of Women and would do what it could to improve the condition of women in Afghanistan.
The condition of women in Afghanistan is deplorable; that there is no denial. The constant stream of abuse and punishment they receive borders on the unimaginable comparable to a Western society that flaunts it’s liberties like a badge of honor. For women in Afghanistan, it is a precious commodity to be hoarded and preserved for as long as possible. This liberty is not protected by the government, as they have no control over the men who seek to brutally rip it away. The men themselves cannot be trusted, as many of the husbands of these women are the ones who want to take that liberty away. And the West above all is more concerned about peace and stability than the condition of the women whom they should be protecting. So who is left In Afghanistan that could protect these women?
No one.
Afghanistani women have no one rely on but themselves. The fundamental assumption that government, populist support, or international intervention would be at least one of the pillars for Afghan women is a carefully constructed trait of western feminist discourse. The internal support lent by organizations such as the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA), which are organized, run, and funded by Afghan women represent the lion’s share of actual support the millions of underrepresented women in Afghan receive. Further, it should also be mentioned that the support these women give one another and to those of the region represent the best possible aid due to the shared historical agency they have experienced of living as a woman in a Muslim world often wracked with violence and diaspora. If Western feminists and international organizations are to help these women, they must come to understand the struggle these grassroots organizations run by Afghan women had to overcome and what these women have experienced in order to give any appreicable help against feminine oppression in Afghanistan.
The argument that the women’s movement within Afghanistan is purely an internally driven alliance of social pariahs has academic precedence. These essays cover a wide range of topics related to the grassroots strength of the Afghan women groups. Elaheh Rostami-Povey discusses extensively the different intersectional points by which Afghan women have emerged from in “Gender, agency and identity, the case of Afghan women in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iran.” We also see in greater detail the work of RAWA by their own accounts as they detail the resistance movement they spearheaded in “Shoulder to Shoulder, Hand in Hand.” There is also material worth looking at in “Afghan Women Speak Out” who details a more extensive list of
grassroot women organizations involved in shaping the post-Taliban Afghanistan. Finally, we
will examine “Visual Witnessing and Women’s Human Rights” as Wendy Kozol descripes some of the stereotypes held by western media when focusing on the Afghani woman’s situation.
Let us first examine the work that is embedded within the Elaheh Rostami-Povey piece for it gives us a foundation to see how important Afghanistani women’s experiences have built as a bedrock for their own self support. Rostami-Povey (2007: 296-298, 300) argues that not only are women challenged in their gender identity by merely being women, but also must account for their ethnic background as well as the historical agency of their condition. Their identity is born out of the sense of dislocation that has occurred as the result of exile. Rostami-Povey’s (2007: 299-304) work is reinforced by this very concept by explaining that the Taliban imposed marginalization of women was combated by organizing and showing solidarity against collective hardship in the form of diaspora and refugee communities in neighboring Pakistan and Iran. The women in these communities adapted to their conditions; some became teachers while others accepted a reduced roll or status in their prestige, even if they were professionally trained. The Afghani women in exile learned not only about hardship, but they also learned how to organize themselves and to treat their native Afghanistan not as a battlefield or lost home, but as a nation to take pride in and as an identity for those of various ethnic, tribal, or linguistic backgrounds to find common ground in. After the fall of the Taliban, Rostami-Povey (2007: 306-308) also acknowledges that the hardships for these women were still not over for they had to fight a new war against warlords, drugs, and ignorance. But there was also integration issues. Women who came back from exile were alienated by their own culture. Feminists from the Western world saw the Taliban’s defeat as an issue of wearing the Burqa and little more. International organizations and NGOs (non-governmental organization) that try to do the right thing fail because they either ignore the issues important to Afghanistan or denigrate the culture they are trying to help. Here the take home point was that Afghani women, regardless of their previous background, were probably the best equipped to handle their own issues while the governments of other nations should carefully reconsider the help they give.
RAWA’s piece offers a more direct look at how the organization helps shape Afghanistan with it’s involvement into the women’s movement. The organization (2002: 132) asserts that it’s fight in Afghanistan is for survival itself; the women who support this organization do it to prevent hunger, to prevent rape, from being able to speak, to learn, and even to prevent her children or herself from dying. These women lay the blame of their situation on the extreme fundamentalists aided by misguided outside forces (cough cough US, USSR cough cough). First living under the heel of the Jihadi and then the Taliban, RAWA (2002: 133-135) operates in their own words as a “disciplined clandestine organization…striv(ing) to build worldwide awareness of the situation while doing its utmost to assist Afghan women inside and outside of the country.” They make the world aware of the atrocities of the Taliban. They have secret schools for women to learn. They believe that their operations are more successful than the limited attempts of NGOs and other humanitarian bodies who do not work as hard as the RAWA has.
They also fight against the bigotry that their cause may engender. Within the context of their culture, RAWA (2002: 135-138) must also fight an ideological shift that has occurred since the Soviet occupation. Many western ideas they attempt to adhere to in their revolution are seen as negative toward society, whether they are considered as too capitalist or communist in philosophy, the theocracy in charge brands the RAWA as “prostitutes” and “Maoist.” In addition, RAWA asserts it is revolutionary because it also criticizes without impunity those who have harmed the Afghani nation because of their self serving policies (i.e. Pakistan, Iran, United States, ect.) and also takes an anti-Semitic and anti-fundamentalist stance against those facing religious persecution. In fact, the one “extreme” platform the women of RAWA organize behind is a rejection of compromise against the religious extremists who have brought ruin upon their nation. They call upon the international body to reject any moderate overtures by the Jihadi or Taliban because their “moderate” stance still imprisons women. At the very end of the article, they hope that people will listen to them, and that the world will notice their plight.
RAWA’s efforts are noticed by the world body, especially amongst feminist scholars claims the author of the next piece, Sharon Groves (2001: 753). Here she asks the question; do other women have the voice that RAWA has found in demanding better treatment within their nation? Her answer is a unanimous yes.
Groves’ look past the more wellknown RAWA group and seeks to understand the other forces behind the movements that have occurred in Afghanistan and the surrounding Muslim world. She cites (2001: 755-756) a report by Sippi Azerbaijiani-Moghadam that the number of women’s organizations has increased in the surrounding region helping refugees in cities like Peshawar, Islamabad, Rawalpindi, and Quetta, offering aid to the Afghan refugees that have flooded the surrounding regions after decades of instability and war. Afghan women in particular are cited with the creation of organizations dedicated to providing desperately needed services, advocacy, and support groups. Afghan Women’s Resource Centre, Afghan Women’s Welfare Development Center, Shuhada, and Afghan Women’s Education Centre all represent a fraction of the many organizations both formal and informal that help support women in all situations and walks of life. Their support could be as overt as RAWA’s is or simply groups that center around religious worship and study. Each group has a certain level of influence and active within their respective communities.
Prior to the Taliban rule, internationally set up organizations by exiles have been able to contribute to local efforts in resisting the heavy handed rule of the fundamentalists against women. Groves (2001: 756-759) cites the Negar-Support of Women of Afghanistan as an example of the work these type of groups do; a political organization made up of women who have drafted documents based on the previous constitutions that Afghanistan had enacted prior to Taliban rule. It is their hope that they can be included in the discussions for politically realigning their country to help support women rather than drive them away. As it is though, Groves notes that exiled Afghani women have been absent from the post-Taliban political regime, despite the fact that many of these women are now doctors, lawyers, politicians, and have as much a stake in the new order as much as any of their male counterparts are. She argues that without the support of these women who are helping to rebuild Afghanistan and fostering an education for the next generation, the rebuilding process of Afghanistan could be severly compromised.
The final major writing that is to be analyzed is a critique of the role the international world has played in Afghanistan compared to the local organizations of the region. Professor Wendy Kozol severly criticizes a whole spectrum of Western practices related to servicing their own interests at the expense of diluting or destroying the message that organizations like RAWA represent about their struggle, especially about the visual messages transmitted to the West and how they offer a skewed view of what is really going on.
Based on the conceptions of freedom and equality hammered out by Western feminists in the mid 90’s, Kozol (2008: 67-72) argues that these standards that measured opression and discrimination in other parts of the world were invariably drawn to the stark contrasts of fashion occuring in the Muslim world, especially the Taliban dominated Afghanistan of pre-2002. The image of the burqa became a symbol of opression that Western media, politicians, and intellectuals identified with women in the Muslim world. Misrepresentation of visual information and exploitation of it undermines the real message behind the misconceived message. Especially in the case of Afghanistan, the continual stream of images from late 2001 screamed for the West to intervene and “save” the women of that country. These women are not asked about where they come from, what part they play in the community, who they are, or what is the real dilemma. They’re simply pawns for fawning media coverage.
Kozol (2007: 72-74) continues her argument by then reversing the role of victim that the media gave Afghan women, and instead talked about how they were heroically portrayed in 2006. The media takes the progress that local women organizations like RAWA had accomplished and trivialized it again for the images, leaving out the information about the struggle or the means by which these local organizations had achieved the ability to educate their children or go out in public without wearing a burqa and not getting punished for it. Instead, the misrepresentation of Afghani women in images neglected the more expansive struggle of the local people by making them appearing dependent on Western culture and consumerism in order to have some degree of democracy and freedom.
The message behind each of these four pieces represent a narrow range of opinions about the local organizations behind the Afgani woman’s struggle for self determination. They all agree that Afghani women are probably better off because of the efforts of RAWA and it’s sister support groups. Rostami-Povey (2007: 300) believes it helped give Afghan women, espcially those living in exile, a solid and firm identity to rally behind despite the various gender, linquistic, and historical agencies that various women came from. Groves cited several examples of the innumerable ways that Afghan women were helping their own cause. Kozol, through criticizing the Western media acknowledged the RAWA sees itself to as vital to the well being of the nation as a whole.
Where we see a divide in opinion is on the role of the West in the present and future incarnations of Afghanistan. We see a wider range of opinions or even emotions being disseminated through their works about the United States and other international powers and their influence in Afghanistan.
That all being said, it should be noted the articles are somewhat silent on the matter of how effective grassroots women’s organizations are in their mission of protecting and expanding women’s rights in Afghanistan. The authors remain relatively mute on statistically how many women are now educated, or the number that have been gainfully employed through the efforts of these organizations. The piece written by RAWA (2002: 137) actually gives a negative assessment on the educational levels of Afghanistani children receiving an education, but it had less to do with RAWA’s efforts as it was the effectiveness of the Taliban government in causing illiteracy rates to soar.
As the research clearly indicates, the role of Afghan women and the organizations that were started and continued on their own volition was in no small part the result of their herculean efforts to oppose a system of oppression that continues to severly crimp their freedom today.
Bibliography
Groves, Sharon (2001). Afghan Women Speak Out. Feminist Studies. 27, 753-759.
Khan, Noor, & Vogt, Heidi (2008, November 14). Afghan school empty after acid attack on girls. International Herald Tribune, Retrieved March 2009, from
http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/14/asia/kandahar.php. Kozol, Wendy (2008). Visual Witnessing and Women's Human Rights. Peace Review. 20, 67-75.
Patience, Martin (2009, March 19). Afghan women who turn to immolation. BBC News, Retrieved March 2009, from
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/south_asia/7942819.stm Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan, (2002). Shoulder to Shoulder, Hand in Hand. Radical History Review. 82, 131-140.
Rostami-Povey, Elaheh (2007). Gender, agency and identity, the case of Afghan women in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iran. The Journal of Development Studies. 43, 294-311.
Shamin, Shah (2008, July 6). Women in Afghanistan: Deprived of basic necessities . Meri News, Retrieved March 2009, from
http://www.merinews.com/catFull.jsp?articleID=137102 United Nations, (2009, March 6). Report: More young girls face rape in Afghanistan. CNN.com International, Retrieved March 2009, from
http://edition.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/asiapcf/03/06/afghan.women/?iref=mpstoryview
